A Crescent Still Abides

Nov02

Stefania Ciocia reflects on grief, and Emily Dickinson, on All Souls’ Day

As
the carnivalesque spirit of Halloween subsides, people from Christian
communities all over the world mark All Souls’ Day, or the Day of the Dead, on
2 November. The date is an unofficial national holiday in many Catholic countries,
including my native Italy, where families often get together to visit the final
resting place of their loved ones. I have taken part in these pilgrimages
myself, the whole extended family converging from the opposite ends of the
peninsula to the little village in the Veneto region where my maternal grandparents,
and two of my great-grandparents, are buried. I have always found these
gatherings uplifting: deeply-felt absences are momentarily filled by the
sharing of happy memories, and the collective sadness gets parcelled out,
further defused by the necessity to attend to babies and toddlers, the new
generations in the family. It has been a while since I have been able to join
these reunions. If I were able to travel back to Italy this November, the whole
ritual would have a novel rawness for me.

Like
most of us, I have occasionally faced times of great sorrow, but I had never
really understood grief until very recently. My mother died ten weeks ago, and
yes, I am still counting, though in my daily life I have ostensibly resumed my
routine and achieved a “new normal”, an expression a friend of mine used in
reference to her own experience of mourning. The thing is I have joined the
ranks of the bereaved. Our grief hides in plain sight, ready to creep up on us
of its own volition. Sifting through my mother’s make-up was unexpectedly easy.
Papà and I even cracked some jokes, teasing Mamma, the way we would have done
to her face, for having kept a couple of tiny eye-pencil stubs. She would have
given us the silent treatment over that for the whole afternoon, retreating to
the kitchen to cook us dinner, and make a start on tomorrow’s lunch. The stubs
are still in her drawer. About a month later, three weekends ago, I had a
quiet, steady crying session to the soundtrack of Puccini’s Suor Angelica. Mamma didn’t care much
for opera, and I’d listened to powerful, emotional music since her death with
no discernible effect on my tear ducts. Go figure.

A
similar unpredictability extends to my willingness to talk about her, and the
comfort I derive from sharing my memories of her. I have told the story of this
past summer to many people, modulating it differently depending on my closeness
with the listener (or reader) in question, or more simply on my mood and my
emotional energy at the time. Still, especially if I happen to come across old
friends whom I see only sporadically, I am quick to accost them with my piece
of news, Ancient Mariner-style, so as to forestall the inevitable, awkward
u-turn that would follow my failure to oblige them with small talk.

Reading
about grief has also given me solace. I haven’t gone out of my way to source
the right material, and I am not binging on it. Rather, it seems to have found me,
often through small offerings from kind friends. The one poem I have sought out
is Emily Dickinson’s ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes –’. It speaks to
me of that underlay of numbness that grabbed me as soon as I got the phone-call
about Mamma’s imminent death, and that persisted in the following days, when I
busied myself in the practicalities of the funeral arrangements, and in trying
to step into her shoes, as her elder child and only daughter. “The Feet,
mechanical, go round - / A Wooden way” (ll. 5-6), while the “stiff Heart”
flounders, confused, its perception of time elastic, slackened, undone. “This
is the Hour of Lead” (l.10), heavy and yet barely registering on our
consciousness. “Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the
Snow – / First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –” (ll.11-13).

Dickinson
is brilliant at capturing extreme psychological states; as Adrienne Rich
remarks, her poetry “says, at least: ‘Someone has been here before’”, though
the paradox of bereavement – as another wise friend of mine pointed out to me
the other day – is that it is utterly banal in its universality and nonetheless
shockingly life-changing for each individual it affects. Elsewhere life goes
on. Here too I am reminded of another poem by Dickinson, ‘Apparently with no
surprise’. The demise of a “happy flower” (l.2) is conveyed with no concessions
to sentimentality, in the brutal acknowledgement that this sudden death – a
beheading no less – is not exactly premeditated: after all, the murderous frost
has merely wielded its “accidental power” (l.4). Nature’s indifference,
however, is landed squarely at the feet of “an approving God” (l.8) in the
final line of the poem. It’s for Him that “[t]he sun proceeds unmoved / To
measure off another day” (ll.6-7), an accusation whose blasphemous charge seeps
through its matter-of-fact tone.

And
yet the uncompromising Dickinson knows too how to be the purveyor of more
traditional consolation. I must thank a third, generous friend for sending me
this poem, which I have forwarded in turn to my fellow mourners. Here it is, in
full:

Each
that we lose takes part of us;

A
crescent still abides,

Which
like the moon, some turbid night,

Is
summoned by the tides.

Mamma
is that crescent in me now. And this is another paradox of death: she has never
been more intensely with me than in her absence, though even before she went
she was with me in ways that I wasn’t fully aware of. Take these blog posts. Mamma
would read them, of course; in fact, she’d sometimes ask that we read them together,
so that I could gloss the words and turns of phrase she couldn’t quite understand.
One of the posts we pored over together was that on Little Women. She was inordinately happy about it because it gives pride
of place to her father, Nonno Alberto. She nevertheless observed that it
mentions my own dad and my brother too, and that only she is missing from the
roll-call of my immediate family. She pretended to have taken offence at this
omission, and jokingly insisted that I should write about her one day. Today is
not the occasion in which I was hoping to do so, and this thought has very
nearly stopped me from jotting down this piece.

As I
have been thinking about how to give Mamma her due and celebrate her life, I’ve
realized that I have already written about her, albeit not explicitly. Last
December, on the morning of my flight back to England after my Christmas visit,
Mamma and I sat on the sofa and went through my review of Sally Cookson’s
production of Peter Pan. I wrote that
the “real magic” of the story happens not so much in the flights of fancy to
Neverland, nor in Peter’s eternal playfulness. Instead, it’s there in the
lesson of the play’s closing scene, “when the more experienced amongst us help
our charges to fly away, unencumbered by insecurities and emboldened by the
knowledge that ‘the window will always be open’”. I trust that Mamma recognised
herself in these words, as we translated them together a little over ten months
ago.

In memory of Marilena De Lorenzo

Stefania has asked us to donate her fee for this article to Cancer Research UK www.cancerresearchuk.org

Atlantic Monthly, 143 (February 1929), 184, and FP (1929), 175, with the transposition, as three stanzas of 4, 5, and 6 lines; in later collections, as three quatrains. Poems (1955), 272-73, with line 7 before line 6; also CP (1960), 162. MB (1981), 395, in facsimile. (J341). Franklin Variorum 1998 (F372A).